Frege: Reading guide

Make sure you know what the following concepts mean and how to use them appropriately:

sense and reference

Make sure you understand:

the argument about why statements of the form a = b, where a and b are expressions referring to the same object or individual, suggest that reference is not all there is to meaning;

that reference is external to language: referents of linguistic expressions are objects in the world;

that a sense is the meaning an expression carries that (1) is not its referent, (2) is shared among speakers (as opposed to concepts or ideas, which are speaker-dependent);

that a given referent may be designated by different linguistic expressions ("signs", in Frege's terms) with different senses

for instance, the morning star and the evening star have the same referent, but their senses are not equal; they correspond to different "modes of presentation", in Frege's words, of one and the same referent;

that the proposition expressed by a declarative sentence (the "thought", in Frege's terms) is its sense;

why it makes sense to postulate that the referents of declarative sentences are truth values:

when we understand a declarative sentence out of context, for instance The professor is holding a pen we can imagine a given "thought" associated to it;

when we check this "thought" against the world, against a given state of affairs, we can decide whether the sentence is true or false;

thus, only when the connection between the sentence and the world is made, that is, when we go from sense ("thought") to reference, does the sentence become a statement that can be judged true or false. Reference for sentences involves truth judgements.